College officials, he continued, had expressed concern about the library plans. They found it “overly specialized” and didn’t quite appreciate the genius of Rahimi’s design. But they’d eventually relented and agreed to have it built on this slightly remote site. (The donors had sweetened the deal with a large donation to the annual fund.) Then the college had hired another architect to create a wall that further obscured the building from the public eye.
“So that’s where we are,” Doug said, waving his thick, hairy hands like a conductor. “Quite possibly the greatest library on earth.”
The competition, I chose not to remind him, isn’t very fierce. (I’d been won over, as usual, by his energy and fervor.)
“Some might also say we’re in Diachronic headquarters,” Doug went on. “Others that we’ve vanished from the earth. And in a sense I suppose we have: disappeared into the dictionary.” Then he reached into a new leather satchel, very much like the one he’d abandoned in his New York office. “I believe,” he said, lifting out the Aleph, “you may have discovered that yourself.”
“Wait,” I said. I’d left the Aleph in a bed of socks in my hotel. “How—”
Doug once again placed a maddening finger to his lips. “Someone brought it here,” he said, cagily glancing at the door, “while you were in quarantine.” Then he turned the Aleph on and handed it to me. It was open to a page in the J’s, the one with his entry.
“You know, you were right,” he said, sounding both proud and pained, absently stretching the neck of his shirt. “About my entry vanishing from the Aleph after I left the Dictionary and then reappearing when I arrived here the next night.” Doug took hairpin turns in conversation. Normally I didn’t mind, and even liked it—I was glad I could follow his falcate thoughts. Often I served as his interpreter. But this uncanny announcement gave me a chill.
“Doug,” I said, face stinging. “How did you know that’s what I thought?”
I was used to Memes doing things like hailing cabs, adjusting thermostats, ordering black-and-white milkshakes from the corner deli. But to disappear Doug from a book? To translate his real-time escape from our building on Broadway into his erasure from the pages of its Dictionary? That seemed different. I didn’t know that a Meme, let alone an Aleph, could do something like that. And it was even more unnerving that I’d been able to read the clue. That from the tiny bait of his missing entry—antibait, really, an elision—I’d made a wild and, as it turned out, inspired inference. But I was having a hard time making the next leap of faith: that he could somehow know the inference I’d made. Doug and I were very close, but he couldn’t read my mind—could he?
As I worked this through, worrying a lozenge wrapper and chewing my cheek, Doug smiled wryly. “What—think I can read your mind?” he asked, eerily. But then he quickly added, eyes twinkling, “You forgot, didn’t you? That you told Phineas about my disappearance from the Dictionary? You gave him quite a shock, actually.”
I had a sudden vision of Phineas saying, “My God.” A liquid flash of teeth and gums.
Then, puffing his upper lip and lifting his eyebrows in embarrassment, Doug explained that in fact it had been one of his “clues”: after he’d already arrived at the airport, his phone had beeped with an alert—set up years before and forgotten since—that the Aleph had been breached. It also guessed that the intruder was me, not, e.g., Max or Laird. Doug knew the guess could be wrong (as was the Aleph’s wont), but he felt relieved. He also again very strongly considered going back for me. “I wish I had,” he said mournfully. (“Dad,” I interrupted, “it’s okay.” But he shook his head and kept talking over me.) By then, he continued, he’d been sucked up in a vortex of inertia; he thought that instead he’d log in to the corpus from his phone, erase his own entry, leave the Aleph open to the J’s, and that somehow—between that and all the other hints he’d left, and knowing him so well—if I searched the device, I’d understand what had happened and wouldn’t worry.
Of course when he’d logged in to the corpus, he’d seen holes worming through the Dictionary, and he’d become blind to all concerns but one: getting to Oxford as soon as he could. Later, after arriving at the Christ Church library, he’d put himself back inside the Dictionary and seeded in several more clues.
“Although, to tell the truth,” Doug said, color rising in his cheeks, “I actually did—even before I spoke to Phineas—I did have this strange … sense.” He bunched his fingers into a bouquet. “That you’d figured it out somehow. Even—and I know you won’t believe me—but even that you’d found out by looking in the Aleph.” He shook his head. “I realize how that sounds. But there’s no denying that these are powerful machines. Which is what makes them so dangerous. More dangerous than even I suspected.”
Then he explained the ordeal I’d just endured: a version of the quarantines set up from New Orleans to Mumbai to Perth, in hospitals and gyms and churches. But in the basement of the Looking Glass, as he began to call the building, they practiced a more austere form of silence therapy, coupled with the newest experimental medication.
Because I’d been so cut off from news, that was when I learned that not all problems with language telegraphed the same fate. “When infected people turn up here,” Doug said, “we often don’t know if they have word flu, so-called benign aphasia, or both. And we don’t want to have to wait for an official diagnosis, potentially watching them get sicker, so we deploy simultaneous treatments. Rigorous, protracted silence,” he said with an apologetic shrug, “is the only cure we’ve discovered so far for eradicating any last, lingering vestiges of the Meme. When it works, it helps prepare the way for language therapy, which can help reverse not just aphasia but disordered thinking, memory loss, scattered focus.”
Because I’d had a relatively minor case,3 I’d gone in the hole for just three days. The longest language fast they’d imposed to date had stretched to a week, for one of their colleagues, Alistair Payne, who’d been out in the field helping at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s after the mass infections. He’d managed to get his hands on an infected Nautilus, and after experimentally subjecting himself to the virus, he’d suffered severe damage: seizing, violent, nearly psychotic, raving.4 When he’d arrived at the Glass a week later, escorted by an armed guard and a nurse—and aided in his travel by several influential people who’d interceded on his behalf—no one knew whether seven days would be enough. But experts had agreed that it would have to do. A week was considered the limit of what was safe; longer periods of solitary confinement might backfire, producing bad outcomes—perhaps even Silencing, it was speculated. Fortunately, in Alistair’s case it had worked; he’d recovered.
In fact he’d just served as one of the guards who’d escorted me to Doug’s office. When Doug reached this part of the story, Alistair removed his balaclava, his hair flurrying in a flaxen tumult. Then the other guard took off his mask, too. It was Vernon.
“Vern!” I bayed, face igniting with joy. I leapt from my chair. Caught him off-guard in a quick, unscripted hug. His bony body was an affirmation: it was true. We were all okay.
Startled, Vernon batted gently at my back. “Good to see you, too, Anana,” he said with a laugh, frowning down, his skinny neck somehow begetting a double chin. In his glasses I saw my tiny twinned reflection. How had I not noticed his limp as he’d walked me down the hall? “Sorry,” I murmured, smiling, overcome with giddy shyness and relief.
But Vernon was oddly stiff. Awkward. Twisting away from me, he said, “I’m going to go check on … that,” which seemed to mean something to Doug, who nodded briskly back. Then Vernon dipped his rigid nimbus of hair under the lintel and ducked out.
In the choppy wake of silence that trailed his exit, Doug also acted agitated—clearing his throat, looking toward the door. He started explaining distractedly that news of Alistair’s successful treatment seemed to have spread through certain circles. In the week since, they’d seen a small but steady stream of desperate visitors at the Glass—
part of the reason security was so high.
He also began describing the virus. More than one virus, in fact, Doug explained, each of which—replicating in the Internet, Memes, and human cells—has had devastating implications for language and communication. Perhaps because they seem to share the same source: the Germ, designed to corrupt or erase words.
On that night that I got out of quarantine, he told me only some of what I’ve come to learn. What I wanted to confirm was who was behind all of it, and why.
Doug sighed, haskily scratching the dense beard that had grown thick on his neck. Then he explained that some of the “engineers” Synchronic and Hermes had hired to develop Meaning Master and its attendant virus were in fact hackers. “Not just hackers,” he clarified. “Mercenaries, or worse. Terrorists, maybe.”
It was a word I’d heard so much growing up that it had lost a lot of significance. And even in that moment, part of me bucked against it. But I also felt again right then what it meant.
What he was saying was very hard for me to take in, which Doug must have sensed. I’m not good at hiding my feelings, especially from him. “Are you sure … You really want me to keep going?” he asked softly, looking very doubtful and concerned. But after a moment I nodded grimly, and he gently gripped my arm. Then he said very carefully, “I don’t think anyone at Hermes or Synchronic wanted this.” I knew we were both thinking of Max.
Vernon reappeared then, leaning watchfully against the doorframe. When Doug looked up, I thought I saw them share a strange, strained look that I couldn’t decipher.
Then Doug abstractedly picked up what he’d been saying. At first he’d wondered if the hackers might be abroad. He noted the transliterated Russian and Chinese roots of many fabricated “money words.” And he pointed out that most Memes were manufactured outside the States; it seemed possible that viruses might have been installed during assembly, or tampered with to make them easy to breach.
But during the five and a half weeks that he’d been in the U.K., analysis undertaken by the Diachronic Society, with help from Oxford postdocs, had revealed a fascinating finding: they’d discovered that in fact most hackers were in the U.S., scattered in different affluent suburbs. For very good money, Synchronic and Hermes had recruited brilliant, disaffected young men—and they were nearly all men—some as young as their teens. Gamers, slackers, crackers, mathletes. One, in Santa Barbara, who went by Roquentin,5 was rumored to be a high school freshman.
Apparently the reason so many money words were initially adapted from pinyin and Cyrillic had more to do with the sweatshop laborers first hired to manufacture them, before Meaning Master had been invented (and obviated their employment). These workers were people who, for various reasons, couldn’t afford excessive scruples in following best U.S. business practices. (He also pointed out that while their labor may have been relatively cheap, and in a certain sense discreet, when you don’t pay your workers a living wage and then abruptly fire them, you’d be wise to consider that they may find other ways to make ends meet.) Many of them, as it happened, were Russian or Chinese. Maybe that was chance. Maybe not. “After all,” said Doug, “their governments spent decades perfecting language-manipulation methods.”6
“Like ours,” I pointed out.
Doug nodded soberly. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid that’s true. I think there are quite a few similarities.” Which was perhaps the reason, he explained, that Synchronic was able to find such seemingly like-minded foreign business partners—several in Moscow and Beijing, e.g.—who claimed to have an interest in adapting Synchronic’s business model and developing language exchanges in their own countries.
Doug shifted in his seat. Groped at his shirt pocket as if for the cigarettes he’d given up when I was eight. “But we now think that some of these foreign partners hired hackers of their own—most likely some of the same young men—and may have paid them to disseminate these very destructive viruses. Timed their release to the Future Is Now gala, when a huge number of people would be logged on to the same websites, and used the devices to perpetrate attacks.”
“You really think they’d do that?” I asked, mouth salt-lick dry. “The hackers, I mean. Conspiring with enemies. Isn’t that … treason?” What I was saying felt fake, as if it were from a game. Something I might have played as a kid with my Wyoming cousins, our guns made of wood and glue.
“We don’t know,” Doug maintained. But it was the same tautly calm tone he’d used when I’d asked the year before if he and Vera were getting a divorce. “It’s not entirely impossible that they’ve done at least some of it on their own,” he said. “There’s still a lot more we need to learn.” Somberly he cracked his knuckles, the sound like whiskey poured over ice.
Then Vernon, who’d strode back into the room while Doug was talking, said something that disturbed me maybe even more. From the perch he’d taken up on the edge of Doug’s desk, he said, “Whoever’s responsible, it seems they’ve gotten more than they bargained for.” He confirmed that word flu had spread. The UN and WHO had gotten heavily involved. Just that morning Doug had received a report announcing overflowing quarantines in Belgrade, São Paulo, Lisbon, Seoul. Not to mention Beijing and Moscow.
“The fact is,” Vernon said, clearing his throat, “whether by design or simply gross negligence, tremendous harm has been caused. Harm that for many has been fatal.”
When he uttered that word, fatal, it had a very strong effect on me. It conjured Max’s sweaty green face, gleaming with gold-filing stubble. Cracked tooth. Tumified purple eye. And the mean beam of my mind lighted on him, trembling but defiant, standing in the dirty SoPo bathroom, ringed by men in black. Then the light flickered out, sparing me what happened next.
But the flare kept groping my dark cave of fear until it found something else to illumine: Bart, pale as a marble frieze. I missed him. So much it startled me. I pictured the packet of pills I’d pushed under his door. Wondered if he’d ever found them. If they’d worked. With a deep pain, like the ache of an old broken bone, I saw him in a cold, crowded hospital room. Or worse: prostrate on his floor. Alone. Sick and speechless. Terrified.
“Dad,” I interrupted, clutching the arms of my chair. A white light had started erasing my vision and was closing in on his face.
“That’s enough,” Doug said gruffly to Vernon, holding up a hand.
“It’s true,” Alistair said from the corner where he’d been standing guard, so quietly I’d nearly forgotten him. “After three days in the hole, it’s a lot to hear.”
Doug nodded, a little sharply. And as I closed my eyes, taking tiny sips of air, Vernon murmured an apology—something about a morning press conference in London, how he’d thought they wanted me to be briefed. But my ears were buzzing; the words could barely get through.
When I blinked back into the world a minute later, the white cloud had burned off and I could see Doug clearly, scowling with concern. Then I saw him notice me, and he tried to smile. “I’m just so glad you’re all right,” he said, eyes wetly sparkling.
“I’m glad you’re okay, too, Dad,” I said, reaching for his hand. “I didn’t know what happened to you.”
Doug squeezed my fingers, let go, and sighed. “You know, Phineas lied to me, too,” he said, voice stretched thin like an old rubber band. “He’s a good but very complicated man. He and I have a long history. And he’s always done right by me before. But I don’t know why I believed him this time, without speaking to you.” He squeezed my hand again. “It wasn’t until Susan Janowitz faxed Bill here the notice of my disappearance that I started getting a clearer picture of what was happening back in New York. Even before I reached Phineas to ask him to keep an eye on you, I asked Susan, too, just in case. You met her, didn’t you?”
I nodded, a vision of her red glasses glowing in my face. The scent of almonds, the sensation of her arm on my shoulders almost palpable.
“And say what you will about Susan”—Doug raised his brows—“she took the job to heart.
Still, if I’d known Phineas was lying …” He looked down at his hands.
Some of the lies I already knew; I guessed what another might have been.
“Did you believe him?” I asked gently. “About Max and me?”
Maybe seeing Doug safe freed my heart to feel other things. A very tiny, tea-light part of me missed Max right then. I still do. But right away I pressed Doug’s arm and shook my head, telling him not to answer. Because suddenly it struck me: Doug was alive—thriving. And I seemed to be all right. Everyone I loved had made it through. And if I also felt some sadness and guilt about those not covered by the canopy of fortune, I felt, too, that we would find a way to save them all. But I was wrong.
In the hall, Alistair gave me my bags. “Thought you might like these back,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said, grateful. I’d been wearing the same clothes for three days. But as I took my backpack, I noticed the zipper open on the pocket where I’d kept the Aleph. Thought again of how strangely Doug had acted when I’d asked who’d brought it from my hotel. Wondered aloud how they’d gotten my things.
But Alistair avoided my eyes. “Bart,” he said, looking uneasy.
“Bart? He’s here?” I said, shocked. And my stomach fluttered like a wind-torn plastic bag.
Alistair nodded. Glanced at the carpet.
“Where is he? Can I see him?” My mouth twitched into an anxious smile.
Alistair shook his head. “He’s in the hole,” he said.
Disappointed, I said, “So he’ll be out—when?” Silently counted. “Saturday?”
But Alistair kept his gray eyes trained on the floor. Pressed his thin lips together. “We don’t know,” he confessed softly. “He might be in there longer.”
“How much longer?” I asked, voice rising. “A week?”
Alistair shrugged. When he glanced up, there was no light in his eyes.
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